Law School Combats Human Trafficking in Haiti

The University of San Francisco School of Law’s Center for
Law and Global Justice is set to launch human rights courses at several Haitian law schools focused on
preventing child trafficking.

The new program, “Students Speak Against Trafficking,” is
supported by a $750,000 grant from U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor
and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

The law school is partnering with the State University of
Haiti in Port-au-Prince to educate more than 1,000 law students. The Haitian
law students, in turn, will educate thousands of secondary and primary students
on the human rights violations inherent in human trafficking and mobilize them
against the practice.

The goal, according to law Professor Dolores Donovan,
director of the Center for Law and Global Justice who is overseeing the new
program, is to create a human rights culture that opposes child trafficking and
bring about legal reforms. “The grant contemplates advocacy for legal reform of
Haiti's anti-trafficking laws,” Donovan said. “The major type of trafficking
targeted is labor trafficking of children, which, in plain English, means the
sale of children to work as domestic labor in the homes of Haiti’s upper classes.”

The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
estimates that there are 225,000 child trafficking victims in Haiti, with
another 3,000 Haitian children trafficked into the Dominican Republic.
Worldwide, experts estimate that 10-30 million people are held against their
will as modern-day slaves.

Most Haitians don’t consider labor trafficking as criminal,
Donovan said. “Almost no one in Haiti comprehends that this practice violates
basic human rights, including the right not to be held in conditions of
involuntary servitude.”

The devastating earthquake last year has exacerbated the
problem. The number of children sold into servitude has soared, and
gender-based violence is also on the rise. “As Haitians seek to escape the
devastation wrought by the quake, they have become easy victims for those who
profit from labor and sex trafficking,” Donovan said.

USF’s Students Speak project will focus initially on
Port-au-Prince, which is the country’s major source, transit point, and
destination for trafficked persons. In its second and third years, the project
will expand throughout the country.

Donovan and others from USF are writing textbooks to be used
in the program and will train both Haitian law professors and the Haitian law
students how to teach interactively.

The project is an extension of the center’s ongoing
work in Haiti. Last year, USF sent law students on a human rights mission to
investigate conditions in Port-au-Prince displacement camps. Their work was
complemented by research performed by USF students in the School of Law’s Haiti
Virtual Internship. Students will return to Haiti this summer for additional
human rights fieldwork as part of the law school’s “Haiti and the Rule of Law”
course, which will be taught by Nicole Phillips, assistant director of Haiti
programs for the Center for Law and Global Justice.